Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860 - 1935)
Charlotte Perkins is best known as a writer and leader in the women's movement from the 1890s till her death in 1935. When she was young she supported herself and her mother with commercial art. Her diaries are full of references to painting and drawing greeting and advertising cards.
Charlotte's drawing for a Soapine trade card.
The Schlesinger Library at Harvard has her papers.
The published card advertising laundry soap
In February 1881 when she was 21 she described her day in Providence, Rhode Island after waking up under "14 thicknesses of blanket...Paint marguerites with good success. Do a bit on cards" She was crocheting a shawl and in the manner of someone focused on production rather than process she calculated, "It takes about 30 hours as I estimate it to make one of those shawls. I do five times across tonight, twenty minutes at a time."
She may have cared about time because she was selling her crocheting too. Despite her sewing business, teaching art and selling card designs, she and her mother Mary Fitch Perkins were always on the edge of hunger. A pair of shoes was an elusive goal one winter. Father Frederick Beecher Perkins, related to Harriet Beecher Stowe, was remarkably indifferent to the family he abandoned, sending little money and paying little attention to his son and daughter.
Charlotte wrote in her diary of struggling with the whale, a Soapine theme,
as in this display poster 38" wide.
Charlotte managed to spend the academic year in evening classes at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1878-79.
Her cousin Robert Brown, bookkeeper at the Kendall Soap Company, found a sideline profitable for him and Charlotte. With Robert designing and Charlotte doing the drawing Perkins & Company Designers earned $370 in the early 1880s.
Feb 7 1881. "Bah! A lazy wasted miserable mispent day....Paint less than one card." (She'd spent her day reading.) The following day: "Work on Archery cards with some application and finish 'em.... R(obert) isn't satisfied of course so I needs lug my poor little cards back again."
Walter Stetson painted flowers in Charlotte's copy of Keats's poetry.
The Schlesinger Library at Harvard has her papers.
In 1884 she quit her freelance work after she married artist Charles Walter Stetson and gave birth to daughter Kate a year later.
Katherine Beecher Stetson (1885-1979) with her mother in 1893.
Is that a quilt behind them?
Some blame an unhappy marriage for Charlotte's depression after childbirth but it is most likely post-partum depression aggravating her life-long bipolar disorder, which terminated only with her suicide when she was 65 and ill with cancer. She and Walter Stetson separated in 1888 at her request and she moved to California with Kate.
From Hometown Pasadena
Charlotte and Kate rented a “little wood-and-paper four-room house,” at the corner of Orange Grove and Arroyo Terrace in Pasadena for four years, where she taught art and began her writing career in earnest. She then moved to Oakland and San Francisco.
